Not only hot, but- Scheduled: e.g. 'deploy now' become active at 23:00 (or 11pm ;-) ), or mark a service as becomming unavailable a 3 weeks from now- Versioned: Service A version 1 uses Service B version 2, Service B gets a new version, needed for other things, but Service A should still be able to use Service B version 2 for as long as needed.

I don't know what Ronald had in mind for scheduling, but I've come across those requirements quite a bit over the years in non-Grid environments. For example, improving fault tolerance or load balancing at certain times of day; moving a service from A to B because of changes in work practices, again at certain times of day; giving advanced warning that a service is going away so applications can gracefully re-bind to alternatives.

Most of our tech guys work during the day. During the evening there are 'just' people monitoring the system. It is fairly expensive (overtime and organizing it) to have people work during the evening for just a deployment. So if the deployment could be done during the day and tested in one way or another, but is only initially activated during the night (or even days or weeks later) that would reduce deployment costs alot.

Ah I see where you are going.This is more or less a staging concept that a lot of IT shops use.They take a machine out of rotation and "stage" a version.When the version is "OK" they push to production at night.

Things happen at night because less reports work at night, in case of outages :)